find command with -execdir not reading flags?

Question

I am trying to locate all .jpg picture files in my current directory and sub-directories and move them to another directory. I want the source files to overwrite the destination files, but that is not happening. When I run my command, I am getting the following output for some files (but others were moved):

mv: cannot move './file' to '/destination': File exists

Here is the command I am using:

find . -iname *jpg -execdir mv -f {} \;

It seems like the -f (force) option is not working?

When I went back and did mv -f ./source/file /dest on a single file, it did overwrite properly.

What's the deal? Why is the file not being moved?

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UPDATE: The command listed above is not what I actually passed (sheepishly sighs). The actual command did include a destination (as previously suggested in the answer from @Gilles):

find . -iname '*jpg' -execdir mv -f {} /destination \;

I passed this command again to make sure I actually included the /destination directory, and I received the same error:

mv: cannot move './file' to '/destination': File exists

Are there any possible answers to why this error would show, even with a /destination directory in the mv command?

Answer 1

The command you claim to be executing doesn't match the error message you're getting, but either way this answer should clarify some things.

First, note that if there are any files matching *jpg in the current directory, the pattern *jpg will be expanded on the command line of find. You need to quote the pattern to protect from that.

With the command you've given, what gets executed is something like

cd directory && mv -f file

But mv expects two arguments: a source file and a destination.

You need to pass a target directory, and since you're using -execdir, the target directory will be interpreted relative to each directory where there are .jpg files. Note that the directory must exist. If you want to move all .jpg files to a single directory, create it first, then run

find -iname '*.jpg' -execdir mv -f {} /common-destination-directory

If you want to move all files to a relative path, for example move them to the images subdirectory relative to where they are, you will need to create the directory first.

find -iname '*.jpg' -execdir mkdir -p images \; -execdir mv -f {} images \;

With GNU utilities (i.e. on Linux) you can optimize a little by running mv only once per directory:

find -iname '*.jpg' -execdir mkdir -p images \; -execdir mv -t images {} +